List of Top 8 Kotlin Libraries Used by Expert Android App Developers

After Google officially launched Kotlin, an advanced programming language for Android development, a lot of developers started taking interest in this new language that allows them to save hours of development time.

Even, many developers have also started to learn about Kotlin open source libraries that help them build better Android apps than before. When it comes to talking about the Android Kotlin libraries, they are like blessing for Android programmers, improving the productivity and making the overall code base more stable.

Currently, Android Kotlin libraries are one of the hottest topics for all the Android app developers as they want to explore different libraries so that they can to get huge help while developing android apps.

Recently, one of our Android developers worked on Android Kotlin project and tried his hands on different Android Kotlin libraries that helped him complete the project successfully.

1. FlexboxLayout

Do you want to develop flexible layouts in your application?

FlexboxLayout is an open source Android layout manager that can help you to bring the similar capabilities to the CSS Flexible Box Layout Module.

The library has extended the ViewGroup like the Android relative layout and linear layout. You can add different attributes to the flexbox layout such as flexDirection, flexWrap, justifyContent, alignContent, and alignltems.

There are many other attributes as well that you can add to your child view of a FlexboxLayout. Moreover, FlexboxLayout can be considered as an advanced LinearLayout as both the layouts align their child views successively.

While using this library, when you arrange items in horizontal manner with (flexWrap=”Wrap), you can’t find enough space left in current line, then it will take to the new line.

In order to attend this, you just have to set multiple layout design for different screen aspects such as layout-600dp, layout-720dp, layout-1020dp. However, you can make use of Flexbox that can decrease the number of layouts design.

2. Anko

Anko is another top Android library that is written in Kotlin and maintained by JetBrains. The main aim of this library is to speed-up Android development with the capabilities of Kotlin; therefore, it is more convenient than other libraries.

This is how it got its name from (An)droid (Ko)tlin. Moreover, the library has four different modules, including Commons, Layouts, SQLite, and Coroutines.

When it comes to the commons module, it comes with a variety of helper functions and features. Using the layouts part of the library, you can build UI from Kotlin code with a feature, called Anko DSL.

Whereas the SQLite module of the library has made interacting with SQLite databases a lot simpler. The last module of the Anko offers some of the helper functions for one of Kotlin 1.1 biggest feature: Kotlin coroutines.

3. Kotlin Coroutines

As you know that some of the APIs begin long-running operations like network IO, file IO, CPU or GPU-intensive work and need the caller to block until they finish. But Kotlin Coroutines is the best way to avoid blocking a thread and replace it with the more controllable operation: suspension of a coroutine.

Kotlin Coroutines allows users to develop asynchronous programs in a very simple manner, and they are mainly based on the concept of Continuation-passingstyle programming.

Moreover, the library can also wrap related parts of the user code into callbacks, subscribe to relevant events, schedule execution on different threads, and the code remains as simple as if it was successively executed.

4. KBinding

KBinding is a Kotlin databinding library that is widely used with Anko to allow databinding in a fluent and easy to understand syntax. It is one such library that enables you to bind the data of your models directly to the xml views in a very flexible way.

The library has four different binding modes, including:

OneWay: Binding from model to view

TwoWay: Binding from model to view and view to model

OneWayToSource: Binding from view to model

OneTime: Binding from model to view, and auto release after first emit

5. RxKotlin

RxKotlin is an extremely lightweight library among all these mentioned Android libraries. It adds convenient extension functions to RxJava, allowing you to make use of RxJava with Kotlin out-of-the-box.

However, Kotlin has language features like extension functions, which will streamline usage of RxJava even more. RxKotlin mainly aims to gather all these conveniences in one centralized library and standardize conventions for making use of RxJava with Kotlin.

In addition to this, the library adjusts the source apparent so that it invokes the given action when it is subscribed from its subscribers. Every single subscription will result in an invocation of the given action except when the source observable is reference counted.

6. KAndroid

KAndroid is a Kotlin library for Android, delivering highly useful extensions to eliminate boilerplate code in Android SDK and focus on productivity. Making use of this library is completely amazing as you don’t need to write much code for common functions.

Using this library, you can get huge help in various functions like Handler implementation, ViewPager Implementation, SearchView query text change, TextWatcher, SeekBar extension, using system services, Using Intents, Logging, loading animation from XML, etc.

Using this library, you can put the importance of code clarity and community conventions over preferences. It will make things a lot easier for all those people, who are reading your code and frees you from having to document.

The library a range of features like no configuration that means no need to make decision and special files to manage, built-in format, customizable output, and a single executable jar with all dependencies included.